Senior Integration Engineer

Johannesburg-Based | Scale-Up | Full-time Role | Tech Machine | Hiring Managers: Thamsanqa Moyo, Kaeleigh Stroud

Jem is hiring two Senior Integration Engineers to connect our platform to the payroll, HR and ERP systems our enterprise customers already run - and to build the patterns that make every integration after it faster.

Jem is a fast-growing HR and financial wellness scale-up building tools for frontline teams. We support deskless workers across South Africa with payroll, HR, and benefits products, delivered through modern platforms and AI-powered conversational systems.

You will design and build new client integrations, harden the ones already running, and grow the reusable spine the rest of the team builds on. You will lead the technical conversation with enterprise IT teams. You will also ship product features alongside our Product Engineers - integration is your centre of gravity, not a silo.

⭐ Your Mission

• Make new enterprise integrations land quickly, correctly, and without surprises after go-live.
• Turn repeated integration work into reusable patterns, so each one costs less than the last.

⭐ The Trait We're Really Hiring For

We can teach the tools. What is harder to teach is thinking in processes.

The engineers who are great at this hold the whole business process in their heads - the states a record moves through, who acts on it, what happens at month-end, where the exceptions live - and design the integration around that, rather than around whichever endpoints happen to be available. The failure mode they avoid is the technically correct pipe that is quietly wrong, because nobody asked what happens when someone is terminated mid-cycle.

If you read that and recognised yourself, we want to talk to you.

The other half of it is range. This is a specialist role, held by someone with a generalist's instincts. You will own the whole thing end to end, from the record sitting in a client's payroll system to the moment it does something useful in ours, and at every step you will be asking where AI makes it faster, cheaper or more reliable.

⭐ What Success Looks Like

• New client integrations go live on schedule, and stay quiet afterwards
• Failures are caught by monitoring rather than by the customer, and are replayable and reconcilable
• The second time we solve a problem it becomes a pattern, not another bespoke build
• Integration standards are clear enough that Product Engineers can build to them without you in the room
• Enterprise IT teams trust you

⭐ What You'll Do

Client Integration Delivery

• Own the technical design and build of new enterprise integrations, end to end
• Run technical discovery with client IT teams - data models, auth, security review, environments, cutover
• Map the real business process across payroll, HR and ERP systems before writing a line of code
• Design for the unhappy path: retries, idempotency, reconciliation, replay, partial failure
• Take integrations through UAT, cutover and hypercare into steady state

Integration Platform

• Build the reusable connectors, patterns and tooling that make the next integration cheaper
• Set and maintain integration standards - contracts, error handling, observability, documentation
• Work across both layers: Flowgear for extraction and transport, Python / TypeScript for business logic, normalisation and validation. We will sponsor your Flowgear certification
• Own reliability, monitoring and alerting across the live integration fleet

AI-Native Engineering

• Build integration workflows with AI rather than purely by hand. Coding agents are part of how the work gets done here, not a side experiment
• Build and extend our external APIs and MCP servers, so customers and their agents can build on Jem
• Build agents that watch the live integration fleet: spotting drift, diagnosing failures, and proposing the fix before anyone files a ticket
• Apply LLM patterns to the integration itself - field mapping, validation, anomaly detection, support tooling

Team Contribution

• Raise the bar on integration work across the team through review and mentorship
• Ship product features alongside the Product Engineers when the work calls for it

⭐ You'll Thrive Here If You

• Think in processes and systems rather than endpoints
• Have opinions about what makes an integration maintainable, and can defend them
• Are comfortable in a room with a corporate IT team, and equally comfortable in the code
• Assume it will break, and build for that day
• Are excited by fast-moving, high-ownership environments
• Reach for AI first, and enjoy finding the places it changes what is possible rather than just what is faster
• Would rather own something end to end than own a slice of it
• Want range - integration depth plus real product work

⭐ Requirements

• Professional experience in Python and/or TypeScript
• Demonstrable experience driving integrations end to end, not only maintaining them
• Experience working with enterprise IT teams - security reviews, change control, slow-moving stakeholders
• Hands-on experience with iPaaS or middleware tooling: Flowgear, Boomi, Workato, MuleSoft or similar. Flowgear specifically is a plus, not a requirement - we will get you certified
• Experience with event-driven architectures, APIs, webhooks and file-based data exchange

Nice to Have

• Payroll or HRIS domain experience
• Experience with AI agent frameworks and LLM integration patterns
• Experience integrating PaySpace, Sage People, or comparable payroll and HRIS platforms

⭐ What You Can Expect from Us

• Hybrid work environment with a 3-day office policy in our Johannesburg office.
• Frontline exposure to building real AI products at scale
• Direct work with enterprise customers and complex real-world systems
• High ownership, fast learning, and visible impact
• Competitive salary
• Great Benefits (lunch 5 times a week, medical aid contribution, retirement annuity contribution, etc.) and 22 days of annual leave.
• We respond to all applications. You can expect feedback on your application, even if we decide not to move forward.

To learn more about what Jem looks for beyond the CV, please check out our People Notes on the Jem Ideal Employee Profile here